Arlan Hamilton hasn’t forgotten where she came from. A pioneering technology investor and entrepreneur, Hamilton is the creator of the first scholarship fund targeted at black undergraduate students at Oxford University.

The scholarship covers fees and living costs for one undergraduate
student a year for three years beginning in 2020. It is valued at around
$300,000, or about £220,000.

Beneficiaries of the scholarship must be of African and Caribbean
heritage and from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Recipients will also have the opportunity to work closely with the
Oxford Foundry, an entrepreneurship center at the university that Hamilton
advises, and with the L.E.V8 accelerator, USATODAY reports.

Each student will also receive a $3900 grant to pursue careers in their
chosen field.

“I plan on doing this for several schools over the next decade and
starting with Oxford because I’ve spent a great deal of time with their
students and faculty, and Dillard because it’s my mom’s alma mater and shaped
her,” Hamilton told USA TODAY.

Currently, at Oxford, black students make up 2.6% of the annual
undergraduate student body intake and Hamilton’s goal is to make an Oxford
education available to more black U.K. students.

Hamilton, 39, went from homeless in three years to running Backstage
Capital, a venture capital firm that solely invests in companies founded by
women, people of color and LGBTQ entrepreneurs.

The vocal businesswoman and former music-tour manager’s investment firm,
in 2018, dedicated a $36 million seed fund exclusively to companies founded by
black women.

Homeless and living in the San Francisco airport, with a backpack, a
laptop and she had a dream of becoming the Robin Hood of venture capital,
Hamilton recalled in an interview with CNBC Make It.

“It was pretty traumatic to sleep on the floor of the airport and hope
that that’s not illegal because I didn’t know at the time,” she said.

According to CNBC Make It, Hamilton, who grew up near Dallas, Texas,
started her first business in the 3rd grade, with the help of her mom.

She got her first job as a cashier at Pudge Brothers Pizza at the age of
15, working her way up to assistant manager.

Hamilton pursued a career in the music industry, after high school,
moving up from production assistant to tour manager.

“In 2012, I had been on the road for a little bit and I was really
achieving a lot of my dreams. Even though it was a lot of hard work and it was
not glamorous, I was having a really good time,” she said. “Around the same
time, I started noticing different people like Ashton
Kutcher and Troy
Carter and Ellen [DeGeneres] who were all making investments in
Silicon Valley.”

Hamilton quit her job in music and moved in with her mom in Texas and
decided to study venture capital. “To become a VC, most people go through four
years of school or get an MBA. I thought, ‘I can figure that out,’” Hamilton
told Quartz. “So I just did that at home.”

In three years Hamilton would come out as an investor. “I really didn’t
set out to become an investor, because I just — it just didn’t seem realistic
to me at the time, and it wasn’t an interest until I understood that there were
people who were not getting access to the same rooms as others,” she said.

“It just didn’t seem right to me that most of the people that I knew who were starting companies were not straight white men …and they were starting cool companies! Some of them were small businesses and some of them could affect the world, but they were not getting seen.”